Fan fiction libraries

Today’s analogy: a fan fiction writer sets their story in a world created by someone else, and thus has the opportunity to use both characters and world/story elements that were originally created by others. Especially for novice writers, this can be a boon, as they can focus on some sub-area of fiction writing without needing to create everything from scratch. That experience will help them later understand how to create their own elements and how such elements need to fit together with everything else.

But even experienced writers might prefer to just focus on telling some particular kind of story, without needing to design the whole world and characters from the ground up. In that case, using an existing world can make things much easier. Of course, often a writer will want to tell a story which isn’t quite a perfect fit for an existing world. If that’s the case, the borrowed elements will need to be tweaked, with the creator replacing them with altered versions which inherit most of the elements’ original properties but change some things. If this would require too many changes, it can be simpler to just create an entirely new world, instead of spending a lot of effort forcing existing elements into a purpose they’re not really a good match for.

Still, there are advantages with using existing elements. If the writer doesn’t modify them, and the elements behave as others expect them to behave, the story becomes compatible with a vastly larger set of stories, all taking place in the same universe. Other stories can in turn easily build on the contributions that this story made. It also becomes easier for others to read the story, as those others will already be familiar with the expected behavior and properties of the reused elements and can take advantage of their existing knowledge.

In other words, a writer who’s writing fan fiction is like a programmer who’s using existing libraries.

(And although I’ve only spoken about fan fiction so far, obviously the real world is the biggest standard library of them all. Fanfic writers sometimes get flak for being uncreative and just playing in someone else’s world: but at the same time mainstream writers have no shame in recycling the ideas of others, such as when they brazenly use concepts like “people” and “cars” without bothering to come up with their own objects.)

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To point out the obvious, a programmer who writes with libraries produces both more and better quality than one who doesn’t. (Libraries embody a ton of carefully debugged code and domain-specific knowledge. Trying to cope with clocks and calendars in any critical application would be a terrifying prospect for me.) It seems reasonable that the better quantity claim would hold (a fanfiction writer can outproduce an original writer), but the better quality *doesn’t* seem to hold. The best fanfictions I’ve read are pretty good, but none of the fantasy or SF fanfictions I’ve read have ever made me think “this could win a Hugo or Nebula” (see my bet against Eliezer that his _Methods of Rationality_ has any chance of winning a Hugo).

Points of disanalogy are as interesting and important as analogous points, so let’s pursue this quality question further. Here one worthwhile tack would be to bite the bullet and say that someone working in another universe *can* produce superior works, pointin to things like Shakespeare reworking existing stories and the slow evolution of high quality folklore and oral tales, and argue that the reason that fanfic *is* so bad in practice (even at the top end) is that the best authors simply graduate to original fiction and go commercial.

Wwhy do they graduate to original fiction if they can write better stuff in fanfiction? Well, there we’d have to go to an economic explanation like ‘it doesn’t sell’; and why doesn’t it sell? Economics suggests either copyright (anything selling enough to live off of will attract lawsuits) or perhaps sociology (derivative works are popular online but just don’t sell?). I don’t see any compelling theoretical reason to choose, and the latter has the burden of explaining why fanfiction can be exceedingly popular online but not be worth selling to any significant degree.

One could add empirical data by pointing out the commonness of ‘fanfics’ in pre-copyright eras or alternately point out the commercial success of authorized books indicating pentup demand. Personally, I remember reading asides about all sorts of unauthorized sequels in the 18th century, and in China these days (there’s a bunch of unauthorized _Harry Potter_ books released there; see https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/world/asia/31iht-china.1.6915542.html?pagewanted=all or http://mentalfloss.com/article/31430/13-brazen-harry-potter-knock-offs-around-world ) and _Star Wars_ Expanded Universe or the authorized _Dune_ sequels & prequel books sell very well and making SF/Fantasy bestseller lists all the times (despite the former often being fairly mediocre, and the latter books being truly wretched), so I think the copyright explanation is best: no highly skilled writer puts much effort into fanfiction, even though they would write better books, because they cannot make money off it and being a highly skilled writer already pays poorly.

This line of thought has many implications. For example, it seems like copyright is badly hurting fiction consumers since very few franchises will license out an optimal number of ‘fanfictions’ (due to overhead and transaction costs, personal preferences about “artistic integrity”, imperfect information about writer quality and sales, split rights and other versions of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons etc). But at the same time, this market distortion is pressuring people to come up with original universes to set their works in… and it’s not obvious that people would be making the globally optimal tradeoff between original and fanfiction works. Would _Star Wars_ have been successful and made so many billions if George Lucas had been able to write it in the _Flash Gordon_ universe?

This global question brings up Japan, as well: they have a industry wide culture of tolerating doujin works, which leads to probably hundreds of thousands of pretty polished ‘fanfics’ of all sorts a year (games, music, nonfiction compendiums or essays, comics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C5%8Djin – to bring up http://www.gwern.net/Touhou again, just my first dataset, for one subgroup of doujin music, yields ~44000 pieces of music over a decade). In general, they seem to vastly outperform comparable Western outputs (there may be millions of fanfictions on fanfiction.net, but how many _Harry Potter_ albums are there?) despite being output by a much smaller aging population, suggesting that American copyright is badly damaging fanfic output. Yet, it’s American original universes which sell countless billions overseas and is globally popular. While Japanese works… not so much. Certainly Japan managed to sell a fair bit overseas in the ’90s, but that was a long time ago. What was the last _Pokemon_ or _Power Rangers_ or _Sailor Moon_? _Naruto_ is popular, but not *that* popular. And there’s pessimism about the future of Nintendo and Sony, which will reduce overseas sales of ‘original’ works even more.

(A patch: why do we care about original vs fanfiction? If there’s deadweight loss to copyright enforcement, as there obviously is, then it’s just rentseeking by transferring utility from the large community of fanfiction producers & consumers to a few original-universe lottery winners like George Lucas and there’s no reason to support it. Here we might appeal to the original justification of copyright and patents: building up the common stock or ‘capital’ of science and technology and literature, trading short-term losses for long-term gains. Every new original universe which gains a following has added to the options available to a fanfiction writer, so they can choose the right universe for a story. The problem here, as with IP in general, is that we have a pretty pathological existing system: for an original universe to be truly valuable, it needs to enter the public domain, and pretty much nothing enters the public domain these days…)

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Kaj Sotala:
Every now and then one sees accusations of plagiarism, in e.g. design: frequently, the evidence is just "these two designs are way too similar for it to be chance", based on an appeal to common sense. And yes, no doubt many of the accusations are correct, and it was indeed a case of plagiarism.

But those news always make me wonder - in a world with almost 8 billion people, how complicated and similar do any two designs have to be before we can be sure that it was indeed plagiarism? With this many people, it would be surprising if people working independently and with no knowledge of each other didn't ever accidentally create designs that looked "too similar for it to be an accident". (especially since different designers aren't developing their designs purely at random, but are rather working under similar constraints and goals)

With design, if that happens, then we might never be able to say for sure whether it was independent creation or whether someone did plagiarize from the other. Now this article's example of something that would also feel too implausible for it to be chance, if we didn't have evidence to the contrary, is from photography. There, enough information did exist in the two photos that the two people who took them could verify that they were indeed different shots. But the next time that I see a side-by-side comparison of two designs, one of them claimed to be a plagiarism of the other, I'm probably going to think "yeah, those two do look so similar that one of them has to be stolen... but that's what I would have thought of those lighthouse shots too."

>... there was one comment that mentioned that I had stolen the image from another New England photographer, Eric Gendon. After letting the commenter know that it was indeed my image and that I possess the original RAW file, I headed over to the other photographers page and was blown away. We had what looked like the exact same image, taken at the exact millisecond in time, from what looked like the same exact location and perspective.How Two Photographers Unknowingly Shot the Same Millisecond in Time

Kaj Sotala:
In the Star Trek universe, we are told that it's really hard to make genuine artificial intelligence, and that Data is so special because he's a rare example of someone having managed to create one.

But this doesn't seem to be the best hypothesis for explaining the evidence that we've actually seen. Consider:

- In the TOS episode "The Ultimate Computer", the Federation has managed to build a computer intelligent enough to run the Enterprise by its own, but it goes crazy and Kirk has to talk it into self-destructing.- In TNG, we find out that before Data, Doctor Noonian Soong had built Lore, an android with sophisticated emotional processing. However, Lore became essentially evil and had no problems killing people for his own benefit. Data worked better, but in order to get his behavior right, Soong had to initially build him with no emotions at all. (TNG: "Datalore", "Brothers")- In the TNG episode "Evolution", Wesley is doing a science project with nanotechnology, accidentally enabling the nanites to become a collective intelligence which almost takes over the ship before the crew manages to negotiate a peaceful solution with them.- The holodeck seems entirely capable of running generally intelligent characters, though their behavior is usually restricted to specific roles. However, on occasion they have started straying outside their normal parameters, to the point of attempting taking over the ship. (TNG: "Elementary, Dear Data") It is also suggested that the computer is capable of running an indefinitely long simulation which is good enough to make an intelligent being believe in it being the real universe. (TNG: "Ship in a Bottle")- The ship's computer in most of the series seems like it's potentially quite intelligent, but most of the intelligence isn't used for anything else than running holographic characters. - In the TNG episode "Booby Trap", a potential way of saving the Enterprise from the Disaster Of The Week would involve turning over control of the ship to the computer: however, the characters are inexplicably super-reluctant to do this.- In Voyager, the Emergency Medical Hologram clearly has general intelligence: however, it is only supposed to be used in emergency situations rather than running long-term, its memory starting to degrade after a sufficiently long time of continuous use. The recommended solution is to reset it, removing all of the accumulated memories since its first activation. (VOY: "The Swarm")

There seems to be a pattern here: if an AI is built to carry out a relatively restricted role, then things work fine. However, once it is given broad autonomy and it gets to do open-ended learning, there's a very high chance that it gets out of control. The Federation witnessed this for the first time with the Ultimate Computer. Since then, they have been ensuring that all of their AI systems are restricted to narrow tasks or that they'll only run for a short time in an emergency, to avoid things getting out of hand. Of course, this doesn't change the fact that your AI having more intelligence is generally useful, so e.g. starship computers are equipped with powerful general intelligence capabilities, which sometimes do get out of hand.

Soong's achievement with Data was not in building a general intelligence, but in building a general intelligence which didn't go crazy. (And before Data, he failed at that task once, with Lore.)

The original design for the game didn't have warfare, diplomacy, or technological advancement; all of that was added as the design was iterated on:

> Like Railroad Tycoon before it, Civilization was born out of Meier’s abiding fascination with SimCity. [...] Railroad Tycoon had attempted to take some of the appeal of SimCity and “gameify” it by adding computerized opponents and a concrete ending date. It had succeeded magnificently on those terms, but Meier wasn’t done building on what Wright had wrought. In fact, his first conception of Civilization cast it as a much more obvious heir to SimCity than even Railroad Tycoon had been. Whereas SimCity had let the player build her own functioning city, Civilization would let her build a whole network of them, forming a country — or, as the game’s name would imply, a civilization.

To think, most 4X games today, they tend to just copy Civ’s basic formula, including elements like the city-building, warfare, diplomacy, technology…

And then the guys making the first Civ had no idea that this would become a genre, just putting together systems that seemed to make sense to them. If they hadn’t thought of the technology idea, for instance, would anyone else have come up with it? Today, it feels like such an obvious idea that surely someone would eventually have made a game that also had you developing technology throughout the ages… but would they have?» The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization The Digital Antiquarian

> If someone says “in Rotherham the police ignored evidence that these people were assaulting children, for politically motivated reasons”, then if I’m responsible I will go check how often the police ignore evidence that people are assaulting children for absolutely no reason at all and eventually I will probably conclude that police just frequently ignore evidence of serious crimes.

> I have encountered communities where everyone constantly talked at Rotherham in exhausting detail but they had absolutely no idea about any of the other cases I mentioned.

> I mean that. They just had no idea. You ask them “can you name a csa case where there isn’t evidence that the police could have acted ten years sooner than they did?” and they are genuinely surprised that in the case of Larry Nassar, in the case of Jerry Sandusky, in the case of Jimmy Saville, in the case of Catholic clergy, the police could have acted ten years earlier and didn’t. They’ve heard about Rotherham, and only Rotherham, and because their sources were so carefully selective in which horrible things they let their readers learn of, the readers end up thinking that something uniquely went wrong in Rotherham, instead of realizing that police just don’t actually typically do anything about evidence of sexual abuse of children until years and sometimes decades after they could have.

> As far as I can tell, in every single csa scandal that is uncovered, there’s abundant evidence that it could have been uncovered a lot sooner, and the police got reports and failed to act. This seems to be very nearly universal. I’m not sure why it’s true. I find it disturbing that it’s true. The fact that so many people cover up sexual assault of children is something that has caused me to seriously ask myself “am I the kind of person who would do that? Why not? Those people would presumably have answered that question ‘of course not’, and they were wrong, so how do I make sure I’m not wrong?” And I think it’s a good idea for other people to ask themselves that too! But the people who talk endlessly in horrifying detail about Rotherham and are totally clueless that this is a general feature of sexual abuse cases…. they’re working from a disastrously bad model of the world, and I am pretty sure that a lot of sexual abuse might pass them by because they’ve managed to end up with such a wrong and distorted impression of what the problem is. (If you think the problem is “political correctness”, of course you fight political correctness. If it turns out that actually, near-universally police do not act on these accusations, that points to a completely different solution and all of your political-correctness fighting is actively worse than useless.) Re the TERF thing, I think you underestimate the...

Kaj Sotala:
> ... we hypothesized that extreme forms of music such as heavy metal, which is associated with antisocial behavior, irreligiosity, and deviation from the norm is less prevalent in the regions with higher prevalence of pathogenic stress. [...] Results showed that parasite stress negatively predicts the number of heavy metal bands. However, no relationship was found between the intensity of the music and parasite stress.